Thank You!

Students@SC would like to take a moment to thank the generous donors who helped provide funding for the SC22 Student Program. A huge thanks to Jack Dongarra, this year’s ACM A.M. Turing Award winner, who donated his speaking honorarium in support of Students@SC. We are also grateful to Cornelis Networks, IEEE, BP, Chevron, Meta, Oracle Cloud, and Microsoft Azure for their generous support.

Platinum

Jack Dongarra at SC22 with students.

Gold

Bronze

In-Kind

Georgia Tech showing off their HPL run.

In its second year, IndySCC is an event sharing the goals of the SCC but with an emphasis on education and inclusion, intended for less-experienced teams. The teams compete remotely, using hardware secured by the committee. The teams interface with the hardware using the Chameleon Cloud platform. For this year’s competition, we used over 300 nodes of a retired cluster at Purdue University.

Ten teams competed in this year’s competition from all over the world. The competition began in August with four educational modules where the teams learned the platform and the three applications. Each module included a webinar, homework, and a chance for Q&A.

From October 20–30, the teams took on the Hero HPL Challenge where they had 24 hours to build out a cluster of up to 300 nodes and produce the best possible HPL scores. To conclude, from Nov 4–6, the teams competed in a 49-hour (thanks, Daylight Saving Time) competition similar to the SCC. The teams competed to complete tasks from 3 applications as quickly and as accurately as possible – the teams were also interviewed by the app judges to judge their knowledge of the applications.

Universitas Indonesia working in the dark thanks to a blown fuse!

Team Revontuli, CSC, Finland having a pizza party!

Congratulations to the winners, and to all the teams for a successful competition! 

Best Poster

Clemson University 

Hero HPL Challenge

Winner: CSC, Finland (144 TF on 250 nodes)
2nd Place: SUSTech (109 TF)
3rd Place ShanghaiTech (102 TF)

Overall

Winner: ShanghaiTech
2nd Place: SUSTech
3rd Place: CSC, Finland

Meeting up with old friends and making new ones is something that post-attendee surveys consistently tell us is a key reason why people attend the SC conference. And there will be plenty of folks to see at SC22 in Dallas.

Registrations for the conference are mounting, tracking at pre-pandemic numbers and predominantly for in-person attendance. If you’ve been on the fence about attending, now’s the time to make your plans to join the HPC community for what’s shaping up to be an outstanding conference. There’s still plenty of time to register; read about your registration options and then use the links in Step 4 to register.

SC22 strives to be an inclusive conference; ALL are welcome. We offer family resources including session access, a Parents Room that provides private feeding areas, and on-site care for children ages 6 months and older.

What’s Happening at SC22

Speed is the foundation of HPC, and will be at the forefront of our industry over the next year as more exascale systems come online. So it’s fitting that speed also serves as the foundation for SC22, with the theme HPC Accelerates. The conference offers a robust technical program, plus programs geared just for students and those early in their careers. Due to popular demand, pocket-sized, a program-at-a-glance guide is available at the registration desk.

A key metric of how an SC conference is shaping up is exhibit booth sales. And exhibitors are turning out to show their wares in Dallas; the exhibit hall will be filled with 350 exhibitors. Many exhibitors have increased their booth space from previous years. We’re also excited to welcome more than 50 new exhibitors, too. Be sure to grab your exhibitor map at the registration desk when you claim your badge so you can plan your stops and more easily navigate the exhibit hall.

There are options to connect with other attendees in the SC22 mobile app that will go live on November 1. The app is available for free for both Android and Apple devices; download from your app store (links will also be on the SC22 website). Once you configure the app’s settings to let you be visible to other attendees, you can interact with others whether they’re in Dallas or participating digitally.

If this will be your first time attending an SC conference, please check out the first-timers page and plan to attend the first-timers session on Monday, November 14, at 4 pm. You’ll learn tips for navigating the conference and have a chance to ask questions.

So join us in person in Dallas – or via the Digital Experience. It’s shaping up to be a great conference and we can’t wait to see you!

It’s always exciting to be the one sharing good news. It is my pleasure to announce a generous donation made by longtime SC advocate Jack Dongarra, this year’s ACM A.M. Turing Award winner. SC22 previously announced that Dr. Dongarra has chosen SC22 as the forum where he will deliver his Turing Lecture. In addition, Dr. Dongarra has donated his entire SC22 speaker’s honorarium to the Students@SC program. This generous donation will be used to support the travel costs for the SC22 Lead Student Volunteers (LSVs).

Fostering Leadership

LSVs are previous student volunteers who are selected to help plan the current conference and serve as managers for the army of student volunteers who help staff the conference. They work directly with the planning committee as junior committee members gaining exposure and experience as an SC committee member. This opportunity allows students to foster professional relationships by working alongside the committee members. Additionally, it provides a fantastic pathway for students who are interested in becoming full committee members once they finish their studies, or who just want to learn how to organize events to become leaders in the research community.

Valuable Experiences

The conference planning committee, which is comprised of more than 700 volunteers, relies on LSVs and student volunteers for the additional help needed to ensure a successful conference. Student volunteers perform a wide range of tasks for the SC Conference, such as working the information booth and staffing conference activities. Student volunteers work 15–20 hours during the conference, allowing plenty of time to engage in important educational and career-advancing activities such as tutorials, technical talks, panels, poster sessions, and workshops, as well as explore the Exhibit Hall.

Everyone in the Students@SC22 program is grateful for Dr. Dongarra’s gracious gift. Thank you, Dr. Dongarra!

Come join this year’s Student Programming events on Sunday and Monday in room D227 specifically curated for those in school or early career. We also are continuing our wildly popular résumé doctor event on Tuesday in C4 Ballroom from 10:30 am–12 pm.

Sunday, you will find our classic Students HPC Crash Course (9 am–1 pm) followed by the new Hands-on Machine Learning for Vision and Language (1:20–2:30 pm) and finishing off with Pandemic! Coding Disease Spread with TACC (2:30–5:30 pm).

Monday you’ll find our first Parallel Programming Marathon (9 am–12 pm) and a Careers in HPC panel spanning guests from industry, academia, and national labs (1–2:30 pm). We’ll end the day with our PitchIt Seminar (3–4:30 pm) where you can practice your elevator speech and interview skills.

Please see below for early sign-up requirements and extra details.

Questions? Please reach out to Alana Romanella, Students@SC Student Programming Chair.

Student Programming Schedule

Sign Up

Students HPC Crash Course

The two-part event is designed to be beginner friendly, and open to anyone who wants to learn more about HPC. The first session will take place virtually before SC and will provide lessons in foundational skills.  The second session will take place in person at SC and will introduce common parallel and accelerated computing methods. You can attend one or both sessions.

Virtual Pre-Conference Event

• Thursday, November 10, 12–3:30 pm CST
• Zoom (provided at registration)

The pre-conference virtual Day 1 will be delivered by Zoom/Slack/Git. During Day 1, we will explain how/why HPC can be useful to you, help you get set up with an ssh client that will allow you to log in to a remote UNIX environment. Then we will cover the foundational skills needed to participate in hands-on HPC exercises including, UNIX, command-line text editors, and an introduction to C and Python programming. Participants will be supported by OLCF staff through a combination of Zoom and Slack. Students will have access to a Unix environment. This session is recommended but not required for the Conference Hands on HPC session.

In-Person at SC Session

• Sunday, November 13, 9 am–1 pm CST
• Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center, Room D227

During the in-person sessions at the conference, we will give an overview of HPC programming environments, parallel programming models, job schedulers & job launchers, before directing participants to a set of self-guided HPC challenges that cover basic parallel programming and GPU programming topics. These self-guided challenges will be performed on OLCF’s Ascent training cluster which has an architecture identical to one cabinet of the Summit Supercomputer. Students will have access to Ascent until November 30 to complete all the exercises. Students who complete a select number of the exercises and challenges by November 30, will receive a certificate for completing an Introduction to HPC. 

To speed access to the training cluster, registration prior to November 7, 2022 is requested. Register for one or both sessions.

HPC Crash Course Registration

Sign Up

Pandemic! Coding Disease Spread with TACC

Sunday, November 13, 2:30–5:30 pm CST

Experience a slice of the computational research world, take the role of a computational scientist tasked with understanding a pandemic currently spreading through a community and researching solutions to keep the community safe.

It starts with a simple scientific process, using simple probability to get a “person” sick. Then expand that simple process into a computational model to simulate a disease propagating through a set population. Students will be broken into teams and given a set of challenges, requiring the teams to update and expand their computational models to meet.

Register prior to November 7, 2022 by creating an account using your institutional email address.

Pandemic! Registration

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Parallel Programming Marathon

Do you love a challenge? Have you ever participated in coding competitions like the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC)? Do you want to test your parallel and distributed programming skills or develop them? Come join us in the first Parallel Programming Marathon at SC! You will receive a set of problem descriptions and sequential/serial solutions. You are challenged to optimize them while keeping the output correct using parallel and distributed programming techniques. Your aggregated speed up will determine your place in the rank! The contest will be asynchronous and will stay open for three days, so you can explore all SC offers while having some fun coding. Are you ready?

Marathon Registration

Announcing the SCC Benchmark

We are excited to announce that the SC22 Reproducibility Challenge Committee has selected the Student Cluster Competition (SCC) benchmark for this year’s Reproducibility Challenge.

The honor goes to the SC21 paper “Productivity, Portability, Performance: Data-Centric Python,” by Alexandros Nikolaos Ziogas, Timo Schneider, Tal Ben-Nun, Alexandru Calotoiu, Tiziano De Matteis, Johannes de Fine Licht, Luca Lavarini, and Torsten Hoefler from ETH Zurich, Switzerland.

A team of reviewers selected the paper from 38 accepted SC21 papers that had achieved all three badges: Artifact Available, Artifact Evaluated-Functional, and Results Reproduced on the compatibility of the code on a range of hardware, the science, and the commitment of the team after interviewing the shortlisted authors.

The authors will work with the Reproducibility Challenge Committee to create a reproducible benchmark that builds on the paper’s results. The problem size will be adjusted considering that the teams will have a smaller-scale supercomputer as part of the competition.

At SC22, the SCC teams will be asked to run the code, replicating the findings from the original paper. The code this year is based on Python and supports a variety of hardware, such as Intel, AMD, IBM POWER CPUs, NIVIDIA, AMD GPUs, Intel/Xilinc FPGAs, ARM (a64fx), etc.

Python is popular in the scientific community due to its portability and productivity. This paper explores its suitability as an HPC language, focusing on Python’s performance characteristics and ways in which it can be made more suitable to HPC. To that end, it puts to the test several frameworks that accelerate the execution of numerical workloads in Python on different hardware architectures: Numba, Pythran, CuPy, and DaCe – the authors’ own framework. (You can find more information in the repositories DaCe, NPBench, and the paper presentation.) The main artifact is NPBench, a collection of scientific benchmarks written in Python targeting those frameworks. This year’s reproducibility challenge will ask the students to work with Python as an HPC language and compete to achieve the best performance utilizing the Python toolchain of their choice.

What makes the work of the student teams particularly relevant is the replication of this paper’s work across the different clusters that will be fielded by the teams. In the era of heterogeneous computing, porting applications from one platform to another is not a simple task.

The work of the student teams at SC22 is a fantastic way to dive into reproducibility challenges across various platforms and emerge with shareable, robust insights. It is the ensemble of each team’s implementation and execution of the challenge on 16 different platforms that earned this paper ACM’s “Results Reproduced” badge in the ACM Digital Library.

Sharing is at the core of the Reproducibility Challenge, so the work of the SCC teams will be collected and published. We have already published three special issues in Parallel Computing and a few in IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems; one of the latest ones from SC20 SCC can be found here.

Behind the Scenes: The Selection Process

We had a diverse committee staffed with members from universities, national laboratories, and organizations from six different countries. The selected paper was chosen with the help of these 12 committee members, whose expertise was invaluable in this process and we would like to extend our appreciation to each of them.

An initial round of reviews was conducted to determine suitability for the competition. Reviewers looked at whether the finalist papers had an application that could be run by the student teams on the broad range of hardware types and cluster configurations that are typically fielded by SCC teams. This initial review eliminated over 50 percent of the potential papers, for reasons such as inability to be executed on a variety of hardware, or it was not obvious how to prepare a benchmark appropriate for SCC.

A second round of reviews, including at least two for each paper, looked at which application would be best suited for the SCC teams. To compile the overall score, we ranked the openness of the code (whether it is open source and available); the feasibility, considering the available hardware; and the accessibility of the science behind the paper to the student teams.

Finally, six papers were shortlisted. We interviewed the authors of each paper and the committee used the criteria described above to select this paper.

The selection of the paper is only one step in a long process that ends with the preparation of the Reproducibility Challenge benchmark – one of many benchmarks that the students must execute during the competition. The details of the reproducibility benchmark assignment will be revealed at SC22. Following the conference, we will publish the students’ reports from the SC22 SCC Reproducibility Challenge, to demonstrate the effectiveness of the SCC teams and their success in replicating the code on their platforms.

Mark Your Calendar

The Student Cluster Competition will be held November 14–16 during SC22 at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in Dallas, Texas. Visit the SCC booth on the exhibit floor and chat with students about the Reproducibility Challenge. We invite you to celebrate the student participants and the authors of the selected paper at the Awards Ceremony on Thursday of the conference. And don’t miss next year’s SCC reports!

We hope you will join us in Dallas to meet these amazing students and watch them race to reproduce this benchmark and other HPC applications.

While pursuing her master’s degree in computational science, Verónica Melesse Vergara attended her first SC conference – SC10 in New Orleans – as a student volunteer. And that experience completely changed her career trajectory.

“It opened my eyes to the wide range of career possibilities in high performance computing,” says Verónica, who today is the System Acceptance & User Environment Group Leader at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). “The relationships I formed at SC10 have been invaluable, and the collaborations I established as a result have helped me grow as an HPC professional.”

“The relationships I formed at SC10 have been invaluable, and the collaborations I established as a result have helped me grow as an HPC professional.” — Verónica Melesse Vergara

Anthony Cabrera, a PhD student, discovered the SC conference through Twitter contacts. Anthony applied and was accepted to be a student volunteer at SC17 in Denver.

“My experience as an SC student volunteer was truly a game changer for me,” explains Anthony, a research scientist in the Architectures and Performance Group at ORNL. “All of my career opportunities have been through my involvement with SC.”

Verónica and Anthony are not alone. They are among countless HPC professionals who, as undergraduate or graduate students, have kickstarted their careers by participating in Students@SC.

“All of my career opportunities have been through my involvement with SC.” — Anthony Cabrera

Dozens of students will have an equally robust opportunity to learn, serve and network at this year’s event in Dallas. Three primary areas where students can benefit:

• Serving as a Lead Student Volunteer, which is limited to those who have previously served as SC student volunteers;
• Serving as a Student Volunteer, assisting in conference operations while also attending/participating in the Technical Program;
• Participating in the Student Cluster Competition, which involves teams of undergraduate students from around the world who put their skills to the test building, operating and tuning powerful cluster computers.

This is a program I’m passionate about, because I know Students@SC is important for finding and developing the next generation in HPC. The student program produces great future HPC leaders.

Besides volunteering and the Student Cluster Competition, students attending SC22 will also be able to attend a job fair, participate in a variety of mentoring programs, and become immersed in HPC through student-specific technical programs aimed at advancing the skills required to thrive in an HPC career.

But perhaps the greatest benefit is for students to take advantage of the ability to meet and interact with some of the world’s leading HPC proponents.

“The networking opportunities are unparalleled,” says Sally Ellingson, who works in computational biology and high performance computing as Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Kentucky and Markey Cancer Center. Like Verónica, she first participated in SC as a student volunteer at SC10. “I fell in love with the community at SC and knew immediately that I would be back.”

Learn more about the Students@SC program, including how to apply for selection as a student volunteer, cluster competition details, and many other valuable opportunities for students.

Students@SC